Raspbian Stretch on DELL E4310 Laptop

by R. S. Doiel 2017-12-18

Today I bought a used Dell E4310 laptop. The E4310 is an “old model” now
but certainly not vintage yet. It has a nice keyboard and reasonable
screen size and resolution. I bought it as a writing machine. I mostly
write in Markdown or Fountain depending on what I am writing these days.

Getting the laptop setup

The machine came with a minimal bootable Windows 7 CD and an blank
internal drive. Windows 7 installed fine but was missing the network
drivers for WiFi. I had previously copied the new Raspbian Stretch iso to a USB drive. While
the E4310 didn’t support booting from the USB drive Windows 7 does make
it easy to write to a DVRW. After digging around and finding a blank disc
I could write to it was a couple of mouse clicks and a bit of waiting
and I had new bootable Raspbian Stretch CD.

Booting from the Raspbian Stretch CD worked like a charm. I selected
the graphical install which worked well though initially the trackpad
wasn’t visible so I just used keyboard navigation to setup the install.
After the installation was complete and I rebooted without the install
disc everything worked except the internal WiFi adapter.

I had several WiFi dongles that I use with my Raspbarry Pis so I
borrowed one and with that was able to run the usual sudo apt update
&& sudo apt upgrade.

First Impressions

First, I like Raspbian Pixel. It was fun on my Pi but on an Intel box
with 4Gig RAM it is wicked fast. Pixel is currently my favorite flavor
of Debian GNU/Linux. It is simple, minimal with a consistant UI for
an X based system. Quite lovely.

If you’ve got an old laptop you’d like to breath some life into
Raspbian Stretch is the way to go.

steps for my install process

Booted from a minimal Windows 7 CD to get a basic OS minus networking

Used Windows 7 and the internal DVD-RW to create a Raspbian Stretch CD